An acid-pasting approach is developed in this work to fabricate the composite of perylenetetracarboxylic diimide (PTCDI) and carbon black in concentrated sulfuric acid. Different from traditional mechanical mixing, the solution-based fabrication strategy enables the sufficient blending of PTCDI as active component and carbon black as conductive agent in the PTCDI/CB composite. Serving as the cathode material, the PTCDI/CB composite shows excellent electrochemical performances in both lithium ion battery (137 mAh g(-1) at 100 mA g(-1) and 110 mAh g(-1) at 2000 mA g(-1)) and sodium ion battery (134 mAh at 100 mA g(-1) and 99 mAh g(-1), at 1000 mA g(-1)), which are comparable to the state-of-art organic/inorganic cathode materials. Considering the simplicity of the processing procedures and the low cost of the starting materials, the acid-pasting approach is a highly attractive method for the solution-based manufacturing of organic secondary battery electrodes. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.